On Wed, 2016-04-06 at 11:33 +1000, David Boxall wrote: > There might still be reasons to own machinery, but private ownership > will be a tiny fraction of what it is now.
Car-sharing systems have been around for at least two decades; we used one in Switzerland extensively as an entirely workable alternative to owning a car. I would say that the two critical prerequisites for such systems are a good public transport system (so that you are not always using a car) and a sufficient population density (so that cars are used enough to make it cost-effective for the provider, and cars are close enough to their users - i.e. within walking distance or easy, rapid pub lic transport distance). However, if you add in the "Uber factor", that second condition changes. It would be replaced by "sufficient density of participating owners". "Sufficient" could be radically different from town to town or region to region. I suspect you would converge pretty quickly on the optimum number of cars for the market, but you might also see pretty firm downward pressure on pricing. Regards, K. -- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Karl Auer ([email protected]) http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer http://twitter.com/kauer389 GPG fingerprint: E00D 64ED 9C6A 8605 21E0 0ED0 EE64 2BEE CBCB C38B Old fingerprint: 3C41 82BE A9E7 99A1 B931 5AE7 7638 0147 2C3C 2AC4 _______________________________________________ Link mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
